The call ended with a soft click.

  Akio let the phone rest in his lap, fingers still curled loosely around it long after the screen went dark. The apartment was quiet. The movie they’d been watching sat paused on the television, its half finished scene casting muted light across the room. A bowl of snacks and fruit rested untouched on the table between them, abandoned the moment the phone had rung.

  Everything had stopped, but his mind was already several steps ahead, assembling a timeline piece by piece. He replayed Aira’s words over and over, stripping emotion from them, isolating facts, measuring gaps.

  Beside him, Gabriel waited. He hadn’t said anything, but Akio had felt the shift immediately—the way Gabriel’s posture changed, the way his attention sharpened. He always noticed.

  “How is she?” Gabriel asked quietly.

  Akio nodded once before exhaling slowly. “Safe, for now. She’s at the police station. They’re keeping her overnight.”

  Gabriel tilted his head a fraction. “Why?”

  Akio’s answer came out cold and even, stripped of inflection. “The Hollow. It tried to kill her.”

  Something twisted hard in his chest at the words.

  Aira was alive, that mattered more than anything else. But the relief was followed instantly by a deeper, more corrosive unease. The Hollow had found her again. Had pursued her. Had gotten close enough that she was now spending the night under police protection.

  And he hadn’t been there.

  The thought sat heavy and ugly in his chest, tangled with a familiar frustration. Even if he’d wanted to intervene, he couldn’t have. The Dawn Hound was sidelined, his body still in recovery, his role temporarily stripped away.

  “When did this happen?” Gabriel asked after a moment, eyes open now, thoughtful.

  “Earlier tonight,” Akio replied, already reconstructing the sequence in his head. “The exact window’s unclear. She left the party to buy ice cream. Encountered it on the way back.”

  His fingers curled slightly against his knee. “She got away,” he added. “But it chased her.”

  Gabriel leaned back, one arm draped over the back of the couch, humming softly as he considered that. “Is she with anyone right now?”

  “Her friend,” Akio said. He shifted, resting his elbow against the armrest, and finally looked at Gabriel. There was a brief pause, just long enough to acknowledge what they were both thinking.

  “That one.”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrowed faintly. “I see.”

  Akio looked back toward the television, though he wasn’t really seeing it anymore. The frozen image reflected faintly in his eyes as he continued, voice measured.

  “According to her, she ran into him outside a convenience store. He took her to the police station.”

  He fell silent, letting the information settle into place. After a beat, his gaze sharpened.

  “I find it hard to believe that’s purely a coincidence.”

  Gabriel leaned back against the couch, fingers idly tapping against the fabric as he considered it.

  “I’m with you on that,” he said at last. “But given the circumstances, it’s also kind of hard to prove otherwise.”

  Akio hummed faintly. “True, there are too many unknown factors.”

  He folded his hands together in his lap and leaned back slightly, eyes unfocused as his thoughts organized themselves into something cleaner and more precise.

  “First, there’s the time window between encounters,” Akio stated. “For it to be the same person, he would’ve had to disengage, reposition, conceal himself, and then reappear in a civilian guise before Aira reached the convenience store.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Akio glanced down briefly, already mapping it out in his head. “She could’ve been running anywhere between five minutes and half an hour. Shorter intervals are feasible, but hasty. Far more prone to exposure.”

  Gabriel nodded slowly. “And there’s also the risk that comes with re-engagement,” he added. “You don’t re-enter a civilian’s space after a vigilante sighting unless they’ve already identified you. Appearing again in the same area dramatically increases the odds of correlation.”

  He tilted his head, thoughtful. “The Hollow isn’t the type to take that risk.”

  “Agreed,” Akio said quietly, his tone remained clinical. “Those two points alone strongly support the idea that the civilian encounter was unrelated. Add to that the fact that he willingly brought her to a police station immediately afterward.”

  He briefly laced his fingers together. “Interacting that closely with authorities after using M.A.W. powers would be reckless at best. Even trace residuals would be enough to implicate him.”

  Gabriel exhaled through his nose. “That’s what bothers me the most. M.A.W. presence isn’t easy to suppress, and police stations routinely screen for infection or residue. If he really were the Hollow, he’d need a way to completely mask the signature—with no visible external assistance.”

  Akio weighed the thought in silence. The M.A.W. always left residue. Lingering traces were unavoidable, especially when the influence was as concentrated as the Hollow’s.

  “We still haven’t confirmed where the Hollow’s power actually comes from,” he said aloud, shifting the angle of the problem. “Which is why we can’t even be certain it’s human.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Yeah. That’s why most people assumed it was some kind of creature. A human carrying that much M.A.W. influence wouldn’t go unnoticed, not for this long.”

  Akio followed the thread carefully. “Last time we fought it near one of the D.L.N. nodes, it synchronized with the data-light system. Its eye turned white and it dismissed the quarantine barrier entirely. That wasn’t brute force.”

  Gabriel hummed thoughtfully. “It definitely wasn’t. The D.L.N. was built to suppress the M.A.W., which means the Hollow isn’t just resisting the system, it’s resonating with it.”

  “Exactly,” Akio said. He tilted his head slightly. “Which raises the possibility that it’s using some kind of external medium. A conduit, maybe?”

  “Possible,” Gabriel agreed. “But that should still produce an external signature. Something detectable.”

  Silence fell between them again, heavy but not uncomfortable. The pieces were all there. They just refused to lock into place.

  Akio eventually let out a soft sigh. “Maybe we’re overthinking this,” he said quietly. “Maybe her friend has nothing to do with it at all.”

  He leaned forward and picked up a small orange from the table, peeling it absently as he spoke. The skin came away in neat, curling strips, falling onto his palm like petals.

  “His involvement is… peculiar,” Akio continued, voice measured. “But he stayed with her, comforted her, and carried her all the way to the police station. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have done that.”

  He split the orange cleanly in half and held one out, which Gabriel accepted without comment. Akio looked down at the fruit in his own hand. His tone darkened slightly when he spoke again, the words punctuated with a detached clarity that left little room for argument.

  “And besides,” he added quietly, “if he wanted to kill her… he could’ve done it then.”

  Gabriel finished the last of the orange slices and leaned back into the couch, folding his arms behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling.

  “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “This is all just speculation. From what it sounds like, this is someone your sister values deeply. Probably best not to cause drama where there is none.”

  Akio watched him quietly, noting the way Gabriel’s tone stayed casual even as his thoughts clearly hadn’t settled.

  “I’m fine leaving it at that,” Gabriel continued, rolling slightly onto his side. “It’s just… I can’t help but feel like there’s something off about him. I could be wrong, though.”

  Akio filed that away. He trusted Gabriel’s instincts, and if Gabriel felt even a small flicker of unease, that mattered. More often than not, Gabriel’s read on people proved uncomfortably accurate in hindsight.

  “I really do need to meet him, don’t I?” he said lightly, carefully peeling away the thin white threads clinging stubbornly to the fruit in his hands. “Feels like that’ll answer a lot of questions.”

  Gabriel’s expression brightened immediately. He propped himself up on one elbow, grinning. “Oh, absolutely. A second opinion is essential. Wouldn’t want Aira bringing home someone problematic.”

  Akio shot him an amused side glance. “He’s her close friend,” he corrected calmly. “Not her boyfriend.”

  Gabriel pressed a hand dramatically to his chest. “Fear and love are basically interchangeable,” he declared. “That’s why you always take your date to a haunted house. Emotional manipulation. Classic strategy.”

  Akio huffed out a quiet laugh. He finished peeling the last stubborn strip of white from the orange until it was perfectly clean, then held it out to Gabriel.

  “Aira says all her past boyfriends found me terrifying,” Akio remarked mildly. “All I did was ask them a few questions.”

  Gabriel took the orange with a grin, pointing upward as if delivering a crucial lecture. “It’s not the questions,” he said helpfully. “It’s the way you ask them.”

  Akio considered that answer with a faint, smug smile.

  Of course he knew. He was being a little hard on purpose. If someone folded under nothing more than polite questions and a steady gaze, then what did that say about their ability to commit when things actually mattered?

  “Akiren is coming to pick her up tomorrow,” Akio said aloud, shifting the topic. “She’s going to stay with him and Adrian for a bit. It’s probably best to get her out of here until things settle down again.”

  Gabriel nodded as he finished another orange slice, the gesture easy and unhesitating. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best. She’ll need time to process everything. And they’ll take good care of her.”

  Akio smiled at that and let his gaze drift toward the window.

  The moon hung low above the city skyline, pale and distant. Somewhere out there, Aira was at the police station—safe, exhausted, probably asleep by now. The thought softened something tight in his chest, loosening it just a little.

  He knew he could be overprotective. It came with being an older brother, with being the Dawn Hound, with having learned too early what happened when people were left unguarded.

  Still, he let himself hope.

  He hoped they were wrong about her friend. Aira valued people deeply, and the idea of her placing that trust in the wrong person only to be hurt again later was something Akio didn’t like to linger on. Tonight, at least, the logic favored optimism. From everything they’d discussed, the probability that her friend was the Hollow was low.

  Maybe they really were just overthinking it.

  His gaze shifted back to the living room, to the television where the movie remained frozen mid scene, actors caught forever in half finished motion.

  “We should finish this movie,” Akio said quietly.

  Gabriel sat up, unpaused the screen, and dragged the snack bowl closer between them. The sound filled the room again, dialogue flowing back into place as the two of them settled into the familiar rhythm of the night.

  ─ ? NEXT CHAPTER POV ? ─

  Gabriel

  Something is tearing through the farms of Windshore—something fast, ruthless, and impossible to track.

  The men who find him don’t believe him.

  A dark fantasy of pursuit, secrets, and survival.

  New chapters: Monday, Wednesday, & Friday.

  Dark Fantasy Horror Mystery Survival